Preview – NAIRI: Tower of Shirin

Preview – NAIRI: Tower of Shirin

This week I had the opportunity to play a demo version of a graphic adventure/point’n click game titled NAIRI: Tower of Shirin. The game takes place in the city of Shirin, that is split in three districts: the poor district, middle district and the rich district. Nairi is a girl who comes from an upper-class rich district family. Her life takes a turn on night when her parents are taken by the royal guard for unknown reasons. She gets helped by a bear named Frederick who smuggles her out of the city, using a crate from a merchant caravan. That caravan unfortunately gets attacked by cat bandits, and Nairi gets found and taken by this band of criminals.

I’m not going to go further in the story because oh boy, I don’t even understand why I enjoyed it so much. The hand-drawn art looks amazing, the characters are incredibly cute and charming too. The city of Shirin doesn’t only bear humans, but also a lot of different anthropomorphic animals such as dogs, bears, ducks and cats. All these species have their own little social groups and specializations, whether it is being merchants or bandits. In the hour I spent on this demo, I felt entirely immersed in Shirin, in its societal issues and in its beauty and comfy nights.

But NAIRI: Tower of Shirin is more than a story and cute characters; it is a video game. And its point’n click gameplay didn’t disappoint me. The puzzles that I had to solve weren’t too hard to become frustrating, but not easy enough to get boring. I expect the difficulty to go up as I make progress through the full game when it releases, which will be interesting. Interacting with the characters and the items is super smooth, and there is no “click on every pixel to try and find something” moment that point’n click games can fall into. On top of all this good stuff, add a marvelous OST, full of beautiful middle-eastern inspired music, and you have a game that I will be closely following until it releases.

To sum it up, I cannot stress you more about it: PLEASE take a look at this game, and support it if you are interested. If the final product is anything like this demo, then we are in for an absolute treat. I can’t wait to visit Shirin again!